India: Heat, dust and fading glory

Andrew Robinson tours Rajasthan's hidden murals

TO us in Europe, Rajasthan is renowned as the land of maharajas - descendants of heroic warrior Rajput kings who built some of the most dramatic fortresses and enchanting palaces in the subcontinent.

Princess Diya Singh: 25-year-old daughter of the former Maharaja of Jaipur in her wedding saree

Less well known is the story of Rajasthan's great merchant diaspora and the often garish mural painting it patronised in palatial mansions of impoverished towns and villages throughout Shekhawati, the collective name for the districts of north-eastern Rajasthan nearest Delhi.

Barely more than a century after they were built, the havelis (courtyard houses) of Shekhawati are decaying. Their millionaire owners are settled in cities such as Calcutta and Bombay, leaving only locked doors, apathetic caretakers and their families in residence. The rich maroons and brilliant blues and scarlets of the images on their walls and ceilings are fading into oblivion, blackened by the tenants' cooking smoke. But enough painting endures to create an intriguing panorama of the lives and dreams of a small but influential group of Indians who eagerly embraced British rule, the king emperor and Western technological inventions, while remaining socially among the most orthodox, caste-conscious, purdah-bound Hindus.

They were known as Marwaris, and today the Marwari community is estimated to control more than half of India's industrial strength, through families such as the Birlas (like Italy's Agnellis). The word Marwari derives from Marwar, the old name for the desert around Jodhpur, once known as the Land of Death, so arid and rugged was its terrain. Traders and moneylenders from Marwar spread through northern India and gained a reputation for hard-headedness. Soon, any merchant who hailed from any part of Rajasthan got called - sometimes pejoratively - a Marwari.

Until the 1820s, the merchants of Shekhawati depended on the risky desert caravan trade between Delhi and the ports of western India. Then British rule began to make itself felt. Eastern India and the entrepot of Calcutta took over the export trade; steamship traffic began on the Ganges; and railways followed in the 1850s. The caravans dwindled. But the merchants responded by abandoning their native land to establish trading links throughout the Ganges valley up to Calcutta. From the 1830s onwards, the Marwaris amassed enormous wealth.

Rather than spending it in Calcutta, however, they sent it back to their families in Shekhawati. And thus arose "the century of the painted haveli" that would last almost until Indian independence in 1947. The phrase is from Ilay Cooper, the leading expert on the murals, who stumbled upon them during a cycling tour of Rajasthan in the early Seventies.

His guidebook, The Painted Towns of Shekhawati (available in India), is a labour of love, describing the significant havelis of some three dozen towns and explaining the techniques behind the paintings - generally fresco for outer walls and secco for the finer, interior work - based on interviews with painters.

For Shekhawati, such a guide is more than usually necessary (as is a car and driver). Many havelis are tucked away in sidestreets and need to be searched for. Then permission to enter must be sought - normally possible in exchange for some rupees, although inner courtyards, originally the zenana (harem), are sometimes still closed. And when you do get inside, the most interesting paintings may require help to locate.

As a rule, hardly any guidance is available on the spot and few people speak any English. Even if you speak Hindi, as my companion did, you are not much further forward. In 20 years of travel in India, I have rarely encountered such blank indifference to local history. It is as if the enterprising Marwaris who left Shekhawati and the people they left behind belong to separate worlds. Year by year the murals are vanishing beneath coats of whitewash, election graffiti and general grime. If their owners in the cities do not take action soon only photographs will be left.

The subjects of the paintings are varied. Many are religious, depicting Hindu gods and goddesses and scenes from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. But as many, if not more, are secular. They depict ragamala scenes (the "garland of musical modes", 36 in all); folk mythology; historical events and personages; everyday life in and out of the haveli; plants and animals; erotica (discreet, but including perversions); maps and places (Calcutta, the Tower of London, even Venice); decorative designs (the only painting permitted in Muslim havelis); and, most entertainingly, the British and their latest contraptions (penny-farthings, Rolls-Royces, even flying machines).

Until 1860, natural colours were used, for instance kajal (lamp black) for black, neel (indigo) and crushed lapis lazuli for blue, cinnabar for red, and pevri (yellow clay) for ochre, though this last colour could also be obtained by evaporating the urine of cows fed on mango leaves. After this date, the painters fell for the new German chemical dyes supplied by their Marwari patrons in far-off Calcutta - the source of the startling chrome-red and ultramarine of later paintings.

As the British Empire reached its zenith after 1857, the wealthy Marwaris of Calcutta kept up with its opulence. And so, in their own naive, wondering way, did the untravelled, unlettered painters of Shekhawati. We encounter a strange-looking ship in a harbour - its name neatly painted (upside down!) "MADE IN GERMANY" (copied from an imported tin of paint?). Princess Alexandra, clearly recognisable, stares from a bedroom wall, apparently unamused by a view of an Indian couple in explicit coitus. While elsewhere Prince Rama, with halo, transports Lord Krishna and his consort Radha in a swish motor car. These later, turn-of-the-century murals share some of the dubious appeal of the better Bollywood movies whose songs scream through the bazaars of modern Shekhawati.

Bazaar art they are, kitsch they may be, but they are a unique part of a fast disappearing record of the endlessly fascinating Indian colonial experience.